High up-front price for a printer with its capabilities. Modest paper capacity. Tiny, non-touch display. Lacks Ethernet. No fax or automatic document feeder.

Bottom Line

The Epson Expression ET-2750 EcoTank All-in-One Supertank Printer has a basic feature set, but can save you money in the long run thanks to its insanely low ink costs.

Unlike the business-oriented models in its WorkForce Line, Epson's Expression products are largely intended for home use, and the Expression ET-2750 EcoTank All-in-One Supertank Printer ($299.99) is true to that model. Although it is priced higher than similarly equipped conventional all-in-one printers, it comes with a large volume of ink and has incredibly low running costs thanks to its use of bottled ink that is poured into tanks built into the printer. This puts it in the same class as Brother's INKvestment printers such as the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J985DW, which uses high-volume yet low-priced ink cartridges to keep running costs down, and Canon's MegaTank models, which use a bottled-ink system similar to Epson's. The ET-2750's limited feature set makes it best for home use, and in that role it can save a household a lot of money over time.

A Basic Home All-in-One

The ET-2750 can print, copy, and scan, but not fax. It measures 9.4 by 14.8 by 13.7 inches (HWD), and weighs 13.2 pounds. You can control copying and scanning, and perform setup and maintenance tasks, from the front panel's tiny (1.8-inch) non-touch display, four-way controller, and related function buttons. Paper capacity is limited, with a rear feeder that can hold up to 100 sheets of plain paper or 20 sheets of photo paper. It has an auto-duplexer for two-sided printing. Its scanner is a flatbed that can hold up to letter-sized paper, but doesn't include an automatic document feeder (ADF). It has a slot for memory cards (SD)—you can print from them without a PC—but lacks a port for a USB thumb drive.

The Virtues of Bottled Ink

With earlier EcoTank models such as the ET-2550, there was some risk of minor ink spills, onto the top of the printer if not your hands (although Epson does supply a pair of gloves for your protection). After snipping off the bottle's top, which acts as a nozzle, you'd carefully tip the bottle and squeeze the ink into a receptacle atop the tank until empty, a process you'd repeat for all four colors. Occasionally a little ink ended up atop the tank rather than in it. With the ET-2750, the top of each bottle is equipped with a sealed plastic "dock" that snugly fits into the receptacle. Once the bottle is attached to the receptacle, the ink will flow freely without your having to squeeze or even hold onto the bottle. Once all the ink pours into the tank, you can remove and dispose of the bottle. I didn't spill a drop in testing this printer.

Each bottle includes enough ink to fill its tank, and it should be a long time until you're in need of a refill. Epson rates its black ink tank bottle, which it sells for $19.99, as good for 7,500 printed pages, and its three color bottles, which it sells for $13.99 each, for 6,000 pages. This translates to running costs of a mere 0.3 cents per black page and 0.8 cents per color page, effectively matching other Epson EcoTank and Canon MegaTank printers for the lowest per-page costs we've seen.

Typical ink cartridges may be good for a few hundred printed pages, and some manufacturers include only low-capacity "starter" cartridges with new printers, so in buying the ET-2750 you get much more ink than you'd get with most cartridge-based printers.

Connectivity

Connectivity for the ET-2750 includes USB 2.0, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and a direct peer-to-peer connection to a computer or mobile device via Wi-Fi Direct. As is not uncommon with home-based inkjets, it lacks Ethernet connectivity. The ET-2750 supports printing from the Epson iPrint app for iOS or Android, and Epson Email Print and Epson Remote Print, which both allow users to automatically print to the ET-2750 by sending it documents via email. Epson gives you the option of having an email address assigned to the printer during the setup process, which you can change to an address more to your liking. I tested the printer over a USB connection, with its driver installed on a computer running Windows 10 Professional.

Respectable Speed

In printing our text-only (Word) test document, the ET-2750 averaged 8.6 pages per minute (ppm), a bit short of its 10.5ppm rated speed. I timed it on our full business suite, which includes documents with graphics and photos in addition to the Word document, at 4.8ppm. These speeds are respectable for a basic inkjet all-in-one, effectively matching the Epson ET-2650 and faster than the Canon Pixma G3200, which we timed at 7.1ppm on the Word document and 3ppm on the entire suite. The Editors' Choice Canon Pixma TS9120 was faster in Word printing, averaging 13.2ppm, but dropped to 4.7ppm for the full suite.

Solid Output

Output quality proved solid in testing, within the average range for text, graphics, and photos. Text quality should be fine for most business use, except for ones that require small fonts.

With graphics, some backgrounds looked slightly dull, and several exhibited mild banding (a regular pattern of faint striations), but they should still be good enough for PowerPoint printouts and the like. For photos, there was some loss of detail in bright areas in a couple of prints, and a monochrome image showed a tint, but prints were generally about the quality you would expect from drugstore prints. Output should be fine for home use, provided you're not a photo enthusiast.

Conclusion

The Epson Expression ET-2750 EcoTank All-in-One Supertank Printer sacrifices some features found in most similarly priced all-in-ones—such as an automatic document feeder, Ethernet connectivity, and fax—in exchange for insanely low running costs and a large initial supply of ink. (If you do need those features, consider a dual-purpose—household and home office—model such as the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-J985DW.) The ET-2750 does include an SD-card slot, which is omitted from similar bottled-ink printers from Canon such as the Pixma G3200 and G4200. However, both these Canon models have better output quality, particularly for photos.

Our Editors' Choice home all-in-one printer, the Canon Pixma TS9120 Wireless Inkjet All-in-One (which uses six ink cartridges instead of bottled ink) has exceptional output quality across the board, and adds Ethernet connectivity and a 5-inch touch screen while coming in at a modest price. The ET-2750, however, may save you money over time thanks to its abundant ink supply and minuscule running costs, and is best for a household that prints a lot and does occasional scanning and copying, and would be satisfied with solid if unexceptional output quality.

About the Author

As Analyst for printers, scanners, and projectors, Tony Hoffman tests and reviews these products and provides news coverage for these categories. Tony has worked at PC Magazine since 2004, first as a Staff Editor, then as Reviews Editor, and more recently as Managing Editor for the printers, scanners, and projectors team.
In addition to editing, ... See Full Bio

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Epson Expression ET-2750 EcoTan...

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